Around January 6, 1886

In Warsaw, Superintendent Robert Hall called a meeting for the new teachers of the Northern Neck Peninsula. The teachers needed to talk about the best way to educate the hundreds of students entering the new public school system. Reverend A. B. Kinsolving opened the session by leading prayers. Mr. Hall began the discussion by encouraging the teachers to express their candid views on each topic covered...

Alexander Rea was murdered on a Saturday morning on October 23, 1868 while on his way to the coal mine where he worked. He was shot six times at close range and $500 dollars was stolen from his body. The corpse was hidden in the bushes and was not discovered until the next day. Eleven years later three suspects were arrested and tried for the crime. Patrick Hester, Peter McHugh, and Patrick Tully, ...

In the years following 1876, after the invention of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, there existed no national telephone organization, just a handful of decentralized regional operations. Bell had gradually acquired all the companies that licensed its telephone equipment in what was known as the Bell System; the predominant driving force in telecommunication. In March of 1885, the American...

A short stocky man with a baldhead and bushy red beard rose to the podium and faced the 2,300 eager faces in the crowd. On September 2,1886 Henry George stood aside John McMackin, Chairman of the Convention of Organized Labor in New York City, and accepted the candidacy for mayor. He begins his speech by formally accepting the nomination, but quickly takes a sobering tone when he warns the audience...

Few citizens of Portsmouth could escape the mourning of K G Gittio's death. On February 25, 1885 it covered the front page news, flags flew at half-mast, locomotives were shrouded, and traffic stopped, while people flooded to his funeral. The city had lost a respected citizen and a leading businessman, regarded as one of the South's best railroad men. Gittio, thinking he had a cold, had...

On February 18th Samuel Clemens' The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published under his pen name, Mark Twain. Twain was born in Florida, Missouri and later moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River much like the towns depicted in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. <br /><br />Twain began work on Huckleberry...

On February 17, 1885, Mrs. Octavia Wyche wrote from Meridianville in Madison County, Mississippi to her daughter Imogene in Virginia about a number of things. Perhaps the most important news of the letter was the complication during child birth that her other daughter Mollie had gone through two days before. Mrs. Wyche noticed her daughter was acting strangely and sent Walter, one of her sons, for...

In early 1885 an African American named McKeever went hunting in Memphis, Tennessee, in the same location as a white hunter who was later found dead. Based on extremely circumstantial evidence, McKeever was put on trial for first degree murder in February 1885. The jury deliberated for two days before they decided to convict McKeever.

In December of 1886, "A Morning in the Kitchen" was published in Rushlight, the magazine of Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts. In this essay our unknown author provided accounts from a day without her cook. She began her essay by remarking on the morning outside and then discussed the tasks of making and cleaning up after a meal. She stated that men's genius was...

By 1900, Staunton had a population of 7,289, and in 1886, the city already boasted of its greatness. The Goodson Gazette, a small circulation paper, ran a few lines devoted to the city's attractive characteristics. Not only did the city have electricity, but also they had streetlights on some of the main streets. They had a telegraph since the 1850's, but did not mention it, nor...